�Neill, generative AI expert and co-founder of Time Under Tension, and Celia Harding, founder of the digital visibility agency LEOPRD. Their expert insights offer a clear-eyed look at how retailers should adapt to thrive in a world where algorithms are driving discovery. The rise of AI as a digital storefront Both experts agree that ChatGPT’s entry into e-commerce isn’t an anomaly, but rather the beginning of a broader trend. “ChatGPT was not the first, and won’t be the last, chatbot to launch e-commerce features,” said O’Neill.“In particular, this seems like a natural extension to Google’s Gemini chatbot. Google could incorporate their existing Google Play services and potentially leapfrog ChatGPT,” he added. It’s true, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s LLaMA-powered search in Instagram and startups such as Perplexity are all pushing into this territory. For retailers, this means multiple conversational platforms, each with its own logic and influence, are about to become critical storefronts. Unlike traditional digital channels, retailers aren’t in control of the shelf space. Optimising for the unseen OpenAI is currently keeping information disclosed on how products surface in ChatGPT’s shopping interface. “There’s no public documentation on how to rank yet. But one simple best practice is making sure your products are discoverable by OpenAI’s web crawler,” O’Neill explained. While some of this resembles traditional SEO (clean URLs, structured data and accessible product descriptions), Harding believes we’re in the middle of a major paradigm shift. “You’re optimising for recommendations, rather than a list of links,” the founder of LEOPRD said. “20 per cent of responses are influenced by your own website so there is a role there to work with technical SEO specialists to make sure that the content on your site is indexing and geared for scraping by large language models,” she said. Harding specialises in a hybrid approach that blends technical SEO with brand visibility tactics traditionally found in PR. Reevaluating marketing spend in the age of AI ChatGPT currently does not allow paid placements, and its recommendations are shaped by organic web data and user-centric logic. A logistic strategy that may have substantial implications for brands still heavily reliant on performance marketing. “Historically brands have allocated a huge amount of budget to Meta, which obviously has over the years delivered return on investment. But Meta ads don’t influence LLMs. If you’re not thinking about how you’re showing up in AI, you’re really missing a huge opportunity as consumers are using it to make purchasing decisions,” said Harding. “To be featured, brands need to invest in PR and look at their messaging everywhere their products are listed online as these are signals large language models are reading,” she added. She points to Meta’s recent $42 billion quarterly ad revenue as proof that brands are still prioritising traditional performance marketing. But the tide is turning with AI models becoming the first stop for research. SEO not obsolete but evolving “A lot of best-practice SEO is also best-practice for chatbot optimisation, and so I believe they will co-exist and evolve together,” said O’Neill.“ChatGPT and other chatbots are currently a tiny fraction of Google’s search volume, and for this reason, traditional SEO will remain important for some time,” he reinforced. Harding agrees, with a caveat. “The challenge for SEO companies is that they don’t necessarily have the experience to drive traditional publicity, which actually is the biggest influence over these models.The models are looking for trusted third-party voices, they trust what others say about a brand more than what the brand says itself,” she said. For brands, that means expanding the scope of their SEO strategies to include visibility across content ecosystems, product reviews, testimonials and press. One possible contingency is the danger of building too much reliance on any single platform. With ChatGPT and other AI interfaces, however, the risk is subtle but still real. “Just like how mobile disrupted eCommerce, chatbots and AI create a new channel for retailers, which can be owned, earned and paid,” O’Neill said. “Also like mobile, this doesn’t mean that existing channels disappear. I believe it will grow the e-commerce pie and continue to shift more sales online.”. Both Harding and O’Neill stress the importance of diversifying visibility strategies and owning first-party data wherever possible. Preparing for an AI-powered future Harding says this is the moment for retailers to act. “If you use ChatGPT shopping, there is a link which says how ChatGPT is pulling those results together,” Harding said. “There’s an option for merchants to provide product feeds directly, and that’s a feature that will be coming. Models like ChatGPT are going to be scraping merchant data, so I think that should definitely be on retailers radars,” she added. She also advises tracking and analysing traffic from AI platforms, a metric many retailers aren’t yet capturing. “Brands need to be thinking seriously about natural language processing and the kinds of prompts people are using to discover them,” she said. As ChatGPT and other AI tools become central to how consumers shop, the retail landscape is shifting fast.  To future-proof their presence, retailers should prioritise AI visibility and invest in experimentation, test new approaches and adapt quickly.  “Now is not the time to bet the farm on AI. It’s time to educate your team, stay abreast of changes, and invest in experimentation and understanding how this will impact your business in the coming years,” O’Neill said.“You don’t want to be erased from the conversation,” Harding concluded.